


Phantom Pain

by strangeallure



Category: Grimm (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Gardening, Gen, Hallucifer, Hallucinations, Insomnia, Kidnapping, Wesen/Wessen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeallure/pseuds/strangeallure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is working a case in Portland when he meets single father Jarold and his daughter Carly. To others, Jarold seems like a kind and gentle man, but when Sam sees Jarold's face, all his instincts tell him to get the girl and run.<br/>Set between Supernatural 7x6 <i>Slash Fiction</i> and 7x7 <i>The Mentalists</i> and after Grimm 2x3 <i>Bad Moon Rising</i>. No prior knowledge of Grimm necessary. This is Sam’s point of view, and he doesn’t know anything about the Grimm universe.<br/><b>Warnings</b>: show-level depictions of hallucinations/possible mental illness; some violence; very brief mention of sexual violence</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantom Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [spn_reversebang](http://spn-reversebang.livejournal.com). Thank you to the mods for organizing, to [meiou_set](http://meiou_set.livejournal.com) for the help, encouragement and spot-on beta, and to [seleneheart](http://seleneheart.livejournal.com) for making the art. Her prompt and the idea behind it really inspired me to leave my comfort zone and write something different and exciting for me. Her art post can be found [here](http://acme-graphics.livejournal.com/41465.html).

There's a hole in Sam's head. It's small and round and trickling blood – slowly, very slowly, but he can feel it anyway. The blood is thicker than it should be, more viscous. He moves his hand to his skull, searching for the opening, for warm liquid, for anything, but there's nothing. Of course there isn't. 

He rights himself in his chair, keeps his hands busy by aligning the stack of books to his right and taking a gulp from his lukewarm coffee. He wants to dig his fingernails deep into his palms; until he can feel the reality of pain, of skin breaking, but he doesn't. This is a coffee shop in Portland with checkerboard floors and flowery wallpaper that doesn’t quite go with the vinyl tiles. It’s a low-key, normal place. A place where he doesn't want people to see him for what he is: a freak. A hallucination-riddled sack of skin filled with meat and bones and too many memories he’d rather forget.

That's why he works in public places a lot, especially now that he’s taking some time off from his brother. Diners, libraries, smoothie bars, even food courts at malls or colleges. Places full of people that are real, that remind him of what's normal and what's acceptable. His hallucinations have become worse since he took off without Dean, but that’s a price Sam is willing to pay, at least for now. 

He gets so angry every time he thinks about Amy. It's not just about her, he knows. It's about what it means, Dean killing a good person in an impossible situation, and it makes Sam think about that one time Dean came right out and said it, said that he would hunt Sam down if they weren't brothers. 

Maybe Dean should have. Sam sure thinks about it – the only out he sees sometimes: just getting it over with. If he knew he'd just be dead, turn into nothing, he'd kill himself in a heartbeat. The problem is that he knows what lies after death, and Sam knows he can't take it. He can't take hell, where he still thinks he's headed, no matter what he told Dean. And even if jumping into the cage with Lucifer was enough of a sacrifice to get him into line for heaven, Sam couldn't take that either. And he sure as anything doesn't want to turn into what’s in between, what they were raised to hate and to hunt, what Sam’s been fighting to become for so long.

So yeah, the people around him – the elderly couple in the booth to his left, the waitress in the mustard-colored uniform with her name embroidered under the logo of Cat’s Café – they all remind him that he's here, in the material world, where no one can roast him and skin him and pull him limb from limb – only to put him back together and do it all over again. 

Sam likes this place, even though it smells of pie he can't bring himself to order. It smells of coffee, too, and of sizzling meat and deep-fried things. It's the smell of when he was a kid, of long hours when their dad left them in the back booth of a diner to make some calls and didn't come back until closing time – of making napkin spitballs and playing their own version of table soccer with Dean.

It's a strange comfort still.

Sam has just ordered another cup of coffee when he notices two people at the table next to his: a girl, maybe sixteen, with dark blonde hair and a brightly-colored blouse sitting opposite a middle-aged man. The way they're sitting and the way the girl's talking, Sam's pretty sure they're related. He feels the corner of his mouth pull up a little. And then the man turns around.

Everything goes still. The muscles in Sam’s stomach tighten, and he feels acid bite up his windpipe. His throat closes up and his tongue swells, taking up more and more space inside his mouth. He can’t swallow and there’s too much pressure in his ears. He’s dizzy and nauseous and his body still doesn’t so much as sway. 

Finally, it's too much. A shallow cough escapes Sam, making his body curl forward. He can't help spitting up a little coffee, which he quickly wipes off with a napkin. He's almost surprised the brown liquid isn't tinged red. 

Sam stares at his hand holding the soggy napkin, and he wants to look up, but he can't. His body feels wrong and his mind is worse. He can't go through this. Not again. He can't look at the guy.

It's ridiculous, of course, probably just a trick of his imagination. Like the one time he saw a movie poster out of the corner of his eye and he thought it was Julia Roberts, but it turned out to be Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. Roughly the same built, same hair - that's all the mind needs to fabricate something.

Actually, Sam's mind needs a lot less.

So he balls up the stained napkin in another clean one and places it on the far end of the table. He swallows down the bitterness in his mouth, presses his feet firmly against the floor and forces himself to look up – better rip off that band-aid sooner than later. It's not Daniel Day Lewis.

Sam’s mind fails, but his body reacts instantly, turning into one big repository of painful tension. Like all of his muscles cool and contract at the same time, leaving him cold and coiled too tight, trying hard not to shake.

He sees the man smiling at the girl, and one moment it's fond and the next it's predatory. Sam wants to get up, but he can’t move. He wants to take his clawed hands and rip the man’s smile off. He wants to run as fast as he can.

The only part of his body he still seems to be in control of is his eyes, so he shuts them tight. 

“This is not real,” he tells himself through clenched teeth. He wants to shout it out from deep inside his lungs, scream it into the world and make it true, but he’s still at Cat’s Café and he still knows how to behave around regular people. So all he can do is to quietly talk himself down, make himself see reason. “It’s not him. It can’t be him. How could it be? Not unless ...”

It simply can’t be him.

By the time Sam is able to move again, the man and the teenage girl are long gone.

\--

Sam tries to convince himself that it was just another hallucination; that his psyche is just trying to spice things up a little, remind him that he’s not the one in control of his own mind.

It wasn't real, of course it wasn't. Just a passing resemblance turned into something more by an imagination that's always raw and bloody these days, that's seen too much, too many unspeakable, indescribable things to ever function normally again.

Still, when Sam packs his books and gets up, he grabs the credit card receipt that's still lying on the opposite table and stuffs it in his pocket.

\--

On his way to the library, Sam debates the incident in his head. His hands grip the steering wheel too tight while his fingers tap out a staccato rhythm. He should go back to the unusual weather patterns he’d been investigating – there might still be a pagan deity to be caught, human sacrifice to be prevented. Sam tells himself that he can’t have seen what he saw; that, if he allows himself to follow up on this, he's only digging his own hole deeper, risks pulling himself into a whole new delusion. 

In the end, Sam decides that the gods can wait. Taking out the receipt, he gets to work. He's a Winchester. Digging holes is kind of his job.

\--

The name he gets from the receipt is neither in the White nor Yellow Pages, and Sam can’t find it on Facebook either. With each blank he draws, pinpricks of unease travel higher up Sam’s spine. It’s a relief when he finally hits upon a mention of the guy on the website of an accounting firm. Unfortunately, there’s no photo, so Sam keeps searching. After another half hour, he has found a picture of the girl that was with him – Carly, presumably his daughter. She was in the local paper this spring when she placed third in a national problem solving competition. Sam can’t make out the face of the man who’s hugging her in the picture, but the caption identifies him as her “proud father”. His height and stature fit, and the name is the same as on the receipt. It isn't Nick, who's lost his wife and his only child, though, and it sure as hell isn't Lucifer, who's lost everything. It's Jarold Kampfer.

There's a big part of Sam that just wants to leave. Bunched up muscles pulsing restlessly in his thighs, his calves, even his toes; eager to just pack up the car and drive. Away from the west coast, back to the heartland, where he always feels more grounded, even if it’s not necessarily in good things.

But what if he's right? What if the guy, an unassuming office worker on the outside, is more than he seems? If he is exactly what he seems to Sam. It has more implications than Sam can think about right now, but there’s one thing he can't _stop_ thinking about: the girl.

What if this is not just in his head? What if it’s more than a bizarre coincidence? What about the girl? 

Sam doesn’t know her, it’s true, but after all his research, he has a sense of who she is, who she might be someday. She’s obviously clever and athletic, not just participating in problem solving competitions, but playing for her school’s soccer team, too. She’s young enough to excessively “like” anything Teen Wolf-related on Facebook and goofy enough to wear a papier-mâché crown in her profile picture. And she’s someone who lost her mother, too: Carly, the only child mentioned in an obituary from several years back that Sam dug up.

If there's so much as a chance that she could be going through anything like what Sam went through, he can’t just walk away. He can’t risk her becoming Lucifer's new plaything.

\--

Jarold Kampfer might be good at protecting his privacy on the internet, but if publicly available sources won’t turn up anything, Sam is not above digging deeper. He pulls up the guy's DMV page, hoping that, magically, the face in the photo will have changed from what he expects.

The guy in the picture is a little younger than Sam knows him, his hair a little shorter, but there is no margin of error, no room for doubt. The lines of his face, the eyes that look like they understand everything about what they see, the mouth that can seduce you with truths just as well as with lies – it's all there. 

Jarold Kampfer looks just like Nick, Lucifer's vessel.

\--

Ever since Sam left Cat’s Café, his hallucinations of Lucifer have stopped completely. He hadn’t fully realized how frequent they still were, but now that he lives without them, it’s obvious how much of his days have been spent pretending not to hear, not to see, not to notice. 

Now, there are no more winks and cocky smirks, no more smart-alecky comments on his life, his weakness, his inadequacy. It should be a relief to finally be free of Lucifer’s nerve-racking voice, of his sympathetic smiles with razorblade edges, but it isn’t.

It’s disconcerting, disorienting. It’s wrong. Sam’s hands ball into fists, knuckles white and prominent with the strain, nails digging into his palms.

If Lucifer is no longer in Sam’s head, maybe he really is right here in Oregon. Maybe he made it out, somehow. Yes, the cage was supposed to be impenetrable – but hey, Sam got out, too. What in the world made them think a prison that could be unlocked to get Sam out could ever contain someone like Lucifer? It sounds insane now, deluded.

Spots of blood start coloring Sam’s palm, his fingers going stiff from exercising too much pressure for too long, but still he’s losing his grip on reality. 

If this is Lucifer, Sam knows he has a plan. And if he pretends to be the father of a teenaged girl, Sam knows she will suffer. That’s what Lucifer thrives on: seducing people, making them think he’s one of the good guys, only to bring them pain in forms and shades they could never even imagine before. Sam knows what Lucifer is capable of; he can’t risk someone else going through this. They already left Adam–

Sam can’t think about that now. He has to stay focused on what he might still have a chance to make right.

There are too many possibilities swirling around in his head, too many implications, and the only thing Sam’s sure of is that he has to save Carly. 

This is uncharted territory, though, and Sam knows that his research skills won’t help him here – but that doesn’t mean he can give up. 

Just work this like any other case, he tells himself. Try to understand the basic set-up of the situation, then get close, get the lay of the land, and take it from there. Pretend that this is just another monster – no different from all the others. 

As long as he doesn’t allow himself to think of the guy as Lucifer himself, Sam feels like he has a fighting chance.

And there’s always the possibility of this being nothing more than an outlandish coincidence, Sam reminds himself, although he can’t bring himself to believe it. Jarold Kampfer might just be a regular guy after all – albeit with a face out of Sam’s worst nightmares and bleakest memories. Sam might still be lucky and find nothing to corroborate his suspicions; he might still be able to convince himself that this guy is just an ordinary family man. Sam might still be able to walk away. 

There’s a voice echoing through Sam’s skull, though, reminding him that he’s never really been lucky in all his life. This guy shows up and the hallucinations disappear. Why should Sam’s luck start now?

\--

The next day, Sam’s mind is in no less turmoil than it was before. If only he could trust himself, trust his instincts. If only he could be sure. Then he could just get the girl and run, bring her to where it’s safe, and then come back to kill Lucifer. 

But what if this isn’t Lucifer at all? Sam can’t kill an innocent man; he has too much blood on his hands as it is. Too many cases they didn’t solve or didn’t solve in time. Too many people – allies and civilians alike – they couldn’t keep safe. Too many vessels they stabbed with Ruby’s knife without knowing if the demon had even killed the person inside.

So no, Sam can’t take a chance on this. 

The next day, Sam scopes out the Kampfers’ house and neighborhood. It's nice and suburban; peaceful. Not the slightest trace of something wrong, something unnatural. Which would make it a perfect place to hide.

The front lawn is nicely groomed, lined by bushes with rosy blossoms, and the back garden is even more well-tended to: raised flowerbeds, bushes with different berries and a vegetable patch. If teenagers haven't changed completely since Sam was a kid, he'd guess that dad here is an avid gardener.

There’s a flicker of a memory, something not-quite-there, and then the phantom smell of long-dead roses fills Sam’s nostrils. He can’t quite grasp what the scene his mind conjures up is about, and before it even forms fully in his mind, the impression dissolves into nothing.

Sam shakes his head, tries to clear it. So yes, Jarold Kampfer takes good care of his garden. 

The garden next door, though, is in a horrible state: withered plants, a dilapidated garden shed and a rusty for-sale sign stuck precariously into a lawn that’s really just patches of dirt with some weeds thrown in.

Time to get in a landscaper.

\--

On Sunday, Sam trims those overgrown hedges and trees and starts pulling out weeds by the cartful.

He never lived in a house with a garden, but Sam used to really enjoy TV shows about gardening. When he was younger, their dad sometimes left him and his brother behind while he was chasing a lead, setting them up in a run-down motel shady enough not to call child protective services when their father didn’t come back for a few days. If they were lucky, the TV set worked. Dean generally was master of the remote in those days, but when his brother went out, Sam always looked for some gardening or nature programming. He enjoyed the greenery, the colors – the fact that a garden could be alive and peaceful at the same time. It made him forget where he was for a while; place after place that was never a home. 

Now Sam's glad he picked up a thing or two about gardening then, although he still spent a few hours at a local nursery, where a very helpful employee set him up with basic tools and supplies and gave him a ton of advice. She also threw in a gardening basics book for free, which Sam skimmed in the car before coming back to the Kampfers’ neighborhood.

After an hour or so, when Sam’s body is warm with physical work, his nostrils filled with the smell of cut plants and grass, and his hands scratched in a way that feels good, he sees Jarold Kampfer entering the garden next door. Tension takes over Sam’s body, making it go stiff and cold. The warm sweat down his back and chest turns chilly and his muscles lock. He forces air into his lungs and deliberately tenses and relaxes his muscles. He can do this. 

Sam moves closer to the hedge separating the two properties, watching Jarold Kampfer out of the corner of his eye. Sam was right: the guy really does love gardening. It shows in how careful he is with the plants, how gently he holds the roses as he prunes them, and how his lips always move a little, like, under his breath, he’s actually talking to his garden. 

When Mr. Kampfer looks up, Sam forces a smile that he hopes looks easy. 

"Nice garden you have there," he says.

His smile is returned with modest pride. “Thank you,” Mr. Kampfer says and lets his eyes travel over the hedge, quickly assessing the space Sam’s been working on. “It’s great to see that place finally get some attention again.”

It’s Lucifer’s voice: friendly and conversational on the surface, but with contradictory emotions shining through. There’s a subtle reprimand for whoever let the garden fall into disrepair and gentle praise for Sam’s efforts to get everything in order again. It’s a push-pull Sam knows too well. It doesn’t matter, though, he thinks. It _can’t_ matter. This might be his only opportunity to talk to the guy, to get some intel. Sam can’t blow it – for Carly’s sake.

“Yeah,” Sam forces himself to reply, just before the pause gets too long. His voice is hoarse, and he has to clear his throat and make an effort to keep his smile light. “It’s a shame how people neglect their property sometime.” He laughs a little, glad to have a script in his mind to fall back on. “On the other hand, that means I have job.”

The man who may or may not be Lucifer looks at him quizzically.

“I’m a landscaper,” Sam explains his fake backstory, “and prettying up neglected properties to increase market value is kind of my specialty.”

“I see,” Lucifer says. No, Sam corrects himself mentally, _Jarold Kampfer_. As long as Sam doesn’t have proof, he needs to think of the guy as Mr. Kampfer, needs to keep some semblance of objectivity. 

“So you’re not moving in,” Mr. Kampfer continues.

“I am, actually,” Sam says, still following the script he prepared earlier. “But only temporarily. They’re turning my apartment into a condo. So the owner said I could stay here while I’m looking for a new place.” 

The other man nods and doesn’t reply, and Sam remembers the hook. He almost forgot the hook. He puts on a grin. “I’m giving him a discount in return.”

Jarold Kampfer grin back. “Not a big discount, I hope.” He throws a meaningful glance at the ramshackle house. “That place is a dump.”

It's like Sam is living in two realities at once. In one reality, he's talking to a nice, soft-spoken guy, someone who reminds him of why he was pining for a normal life for so long. In the other reality, he knows he's being manipulated, he can practically see Jarold Kampfer’s friendly face fraying at the seams, Lucifer ready to burst through his skin at any moment.

Sam’s shaken up inside, part of him is terrified, and if he hadn't had years and years of training in nothing but pretending to be someone else, something else, he probably couldn't pull it off now. Instead, he focuses on his role, on the charade he's learned to be a part of long before dad took him on his first hunt.

"Don't I know it," Sam says ruefully, shrugging his shoulders in a way that should come across as happy-go-lucky, yet a little self-deprecating. "The electricity doesn't even work."

After that, their conversation goes better than Sam had hoped, and soon his neighbor introduces himself as Jarold. He tells Sam a little of what the neighboring property used to look like, before they get back to their respective tasks. 

They’re both still at work an hour later, but Sam gets a feeling that Jarold is about to pack up for the day, so he offers him a Bud Light from his cooler. In the ensuing conversation, Sam drops a few hints, sets up some traps, but the guy is careful with his personal information – Sam tries not to jump to conclusions as to the why that might be – so Sam’s careful not to push it.

Sam’s restraint pays off later in the afternoon, when Jarold calls for him, “Hey Sam.” 

Sam hadn’t noticed someone leaving the house next door, and the unnervingly familiar voice sends a cold shock through Sam’s system. Thankfully, he recovered quickly enough to plaster on a smile as he turns towards his neighbor. Stay objective, he tells himself. Don’t let this get to you before you are sure.

“My daughter Carly just informed me that she won't have dinner with her old man tonight," Jarold Kampfer says. "So if you'd like to come over for some homemade casserole, you're welcome." 

Jarold also offers Sam his shower, but Sam says – with a smile, of course, always with a smile – that he doesn’t want to stretch Jarold’s hospitality too thin. He doesn’t mention the quiet horror that creeps inside his bones when he imagines himself undressing in Jarold's house, standing under his shower with the running water obscuring Sam’s senses and no weapon at his disposal.

\--

That same evening, after an ice-cold shower – he wasn't lying about the electricity – Sam sits at a sturdy wooden table in the Kampfer's house. In _Jarold_ ’s house.

"That was really good," Sam says after a second helping of casserole, and he’s not lying. He wishes he were. Everything, the smell of melted cheese and the beer that’s sitting in front of him, nice and cold in an actual glass for once, and not straight out of a bottle, it all feels so comfortable, so normal. This is a nice home, nothing too expensive, nothing too fancy, but obviously well kept. It’s something Sam could have had, even if he hadn’t become a fancy lawyer with an even fancier client list. An actual, lived-in home of an actual, close-knit family with photos of landmark moments on the walls like weddings and graduations and with a row of plaster cast handprints, dated from 1996 to 2007, hung up on the wall opposite the fridge. 

"Thanks," Jarold says, a note of pride in his voice. "When you grow your own vegetables, it makes you much more eager to learn how to cook. Especially after," he pauses for a moment and swallows, “my wife passed away.” He smiles a faraway, fond smile. “Janie was a great cook, so I don’t think Carly would have put up with packaged Mac’n’Cheese for very long.”

Sam hates this. Hates that it’s harder and harder to think of this kind, soft-spoken man as the monster Sam came here to expose him as. And yet, wouldn’t everything here fit in perfectly with Lucifer's modus operandi? Lulling people into a sense of security, getting them to genuinely like him, only to make the pain hit that much harder when he lands the first blow.

A part of Sam just wants to enjoy this as a nice, normal evening, something that’s so rare and precious in his life, but the rest of Sam’s mind just won’t stop working. Did he just have dinner with the devil? Did he just compliment Lucifer on his culinary skills? 

\--

After stacking the dishes in the sink, they move to the living room and watch the game. Jarold refills their glasses and gets two bowls from the kitchen: a big one filled with tortilla chips and a smaller one with salsa for dipping. There are coasters and paper napkins, too. It’s impossibly, unnervingly domestic.

About halfway through the game, Jarold excuses himself to go to the bathroom. Although Sam is less and less sure about his suspicions the more time they spend together, he’s still alert enough to seize the opportunity. 

As soon as the door locks behind his host, Sam darts up the stairs to quickly check out the upper floor of the house. To the left, there’s a closet filled with neatly folded white linens and towels and a bathroom equipped with a hairdryer, curling iron _and_ flat iron, which makes Sam pretty confident that it’s Carly’s. When he opens the door opposite the bathroom, it’s clear that this room is Carly’s, too. The walls are painted a light green while most of the furniture – including a vintage-looking desk and chair – is white. There are lots of pictures and postcards stuck to a big memo board, and a host of knick-knacks occupy the free-hanging shelves. Sam’s about to close the door again and check the last remaining room upstairs when he notices something by Carly’s window. He steps closer and his heart sinks. There’s a little plastic box mounted on the wall, connected to a set of wires. Sam recognizes the name on the box and realizes it’s etched into the bottom of the window pane, too. He knows the company; they specialize in high-security solutions, bullet-resistant glass and things like that. And their products don’t come cheap.

Sam’s mind is reeling. Why would an ordinary girl in the suburbs need this kind of protection? Why would someone like Jarold Kampfer pay that much money to secure his daughter’s – and only his daughter’s – room in this way? On the other hand, if Jarold really is Lucifer, why does he let the girl out at all? Why does she have a nice room and isn’t chained up in the basement? What is going on here, some kind of game?

In a weird way, Sam is glad to have found out about this, to finally have proof that something here is very wrong. He’s feeling … elated, almost, because this means he’s not completely losing his mind. 

Of course, Sam remembers, this also means that Jarold Kampfer – who might be Lucifer after all – is a real threat. But Sam can’t allow himself to think about that now. He can’t allow the anxiety, the tingly-cold dread that’s flooding his system, to take over. He has to stay calm. And he has to get back to the living room fast.

When he comes down the stairs, Jarold is standing in the hallway with a suspicious look on his face.

“Sorry,” Sam says, giving him his best apologetic smile, “but I had been meaning to go for a while now, and when you got up, I just couldn’t hold it in any longer, so I found the bathroom upstairs.” Sam’s glad he remembered to flush Carly’s toilet and let the water run for a few seconds before coming down. Jarold’s eyes still look at him skeptically.

“Sorry,” Sam says again, “beer has that effect on me.”

“Well,” Jarold says, and it’s obvious that he’s working to keep his tone light. “Upstairs is mostly Carly’s space, and I don’t want her to think I,” he gives Sam a meaningful look, “or my guests, do not respect her privacy. You know how teenagers are.”

“Yeah,” Sam says in a placating way, “absolutely.” He knows even better how parents usually are, though – and respecting their children’s privacy is rarely that high up on their list. But then again, most parents don’t lock up their children in escape-proof rooms either.

If he thought it worked, Sam would take out the weapon in his ankle holster and shoot the guy then and there, but he has no clue what game the other man’s playing, and Sam doesn’t want to tip him off.

There are too many scenarios in his head, too many contradictions in his mind. Jarold Kampfer seemed so _real_ today, tonight, and part of Sam doesn’t want to let go of the idea of that kind, quiet man, who so clearly loves his daughter. Maybe the escape from the cage has given Lucifer a kind of memory loss, maybe he honestly doesn’t remember who Sam is. He might not even fully remember who he is himself. That might also explain why the girl is still alive.

Or maybe Jarold Kampfer does know perfectly well that he’s Lucifer and also knows who Sam is, but maybe he's in a weakened state right now. Maybe he’s waiting for a certain set of circumstances to come to pass or for some artifact that will help him restore his powers fully. But what about the dinner invitation then? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

It all makes sense as much as it doesn’t, and it’s messing with Sam’s head pretty badly. He wishes he could dig his fingers into the lines of his palms for a moment, draw a little blood to anchor himself, but if he wants to save Carly, he has to stay calm.

As of now, Sam’s best guess is that Lucifer is playing with him. Sam knows how much he likes to play. Like a sharp-clawed cat pulling the tail of a tiny, scared mouse, scratching the mouse this way and that, but never hurting it enough for it to die because that would mean the end of the game. As long as Sam doesn’t blink, Lucifer might be more interested in playing than in winning right away.

So Sam pulls himself together and refuses to acknowledge the icy pinpricks of unease all over his body. He pretends all is well and finishes watching the game with Jarold before he excuses himself for the night.

\--

Sam doesn’t get any sleep that night. Of course he doesn’t. His thoughts fizz and crackle through his head, and he can’t wait for the morning to come, for Carly Kampfer to go to school, to get away from her dad. 

God, Sam hopes that Carly’s father will simply let her leave in the morning, that Sam won’t have to break into their house or hack Carly’s Facebook to lure her outside or do whatever else it might take, but he comes up with one contingency plan after the other. He will get that girl out, and he will burn down the house and face the devil himself if that’s what he has to do to keep her safe.

\--

If the situation were different, Sam would have staked out the Kampfers’ place for at least a weekday or two, so he could figure out their routine, but he simply can’t imagine leaving Carly in that house a moment longer than necessary, not after what he found in her room last night.

His original plan involved following Carly to school and faking a call from her dad to the principal’s office about some family emergency, but when Jarold Kampfer leaves the house before seven in the morning, Sam decides to take a chance.

\--

When Carly opens the door a few minutes later, she’s wearing tiger paw slippers, pajama pants and a Peanuts t-shirt. “Hello?” 

“Good morning,” Sam says with his best smile. “I’m Sam, your new neighbor.”

“Ah yeah,” she says, a note of recognition in her voice, “the landscaper.” One corner of her mouth turns up a little. “Almost didn’t recognize you with your shirt on.”

Sam sputters. He hadn’t really expected her to be so feisty. But then again, she’s a teenager. And the way she doesn’t look him in the eyes after what she said and the faint blush creeping onto her cheeks assure him that she’s still a kid after all.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I mean, my dad told me you came by yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Sam confirms, nodding his head. “He took pity on me and fed me something warm because they haven’t turned on the electricity at my house yet.”

She looks at him, clearly wondering what he’s doing at her door. “My dad’s already off to work,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Oh,” Sam pretends to be surprised. “I saw that your lights were on and meant to ask if I could maybe get some hot water for my instant coffee.” He holds up the thermos he brought along and gives her a pleading look.

Carly hesitates for a moment, but then she shrugs and steps aside. “Sure,” she says. “Come in.” 

When Sam turns around to close the door, he uses the opportunity to pull the rag he brought along out of his pocket.

In the kitchen, Carly tells him, “This will only take a minute or two,” as she gets out the kettle.

“Thanks,” Sam says, coming up closer behind her, but not too close. “I really appreciate it.” 

When Carly takes a pitcher out of the fridge and carefully fills the kettle with water, Sam knows this is his best shot. He quickly unscrews the lid of the thermos and pours a generous amount of the liquid inside onto the rag. 

Just as Carly turns on the stove, Sam grabs her from behind and presses the wet fabric all over her mouth and nose. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

She gasps in surprise, letting the highly-concentrated chloroform fill her airways. It doesn’t take effect immediately, though, and Sam is surprised by how much of a fight Carly puts up. She thrashes wildly in his arms, much stronger than he would have expected, and she never loses her grip on the kettle’s handle, finally managing to swing it and hit Sam in the head, dousing both of them with water.

Sam’s lucky the chloroform kicks in right then, because that girl clearly has great aim, and he feels himself staggering back, feeling lightheaded as his temple starts throbbing.

\--

Adrenaline is pumping through Sam’s veins. What did he do? It's all a blur of feverish anxiety, of go-go-go, of not stopping.

He knows he had to move fast, not give himself more time to think, to doubt. Not give Jarold – no, Lucifer, he is Lucifer, he has to be – time to figure Sam out or just get tired of playing with him. Not give Lucifer time to go through with whatever he might have planned for Carly.

Looking back, Sam’s no longer sure about how right he was.

Yes, he found a highly sophisticated alarm system in Carly’s room, but still, she seemed like a good, normal kid. Someone with a sense of humor, who goes out with friends and helps out neighbors. And it’s not like Lucifer had her guarded or anything. It doesn’t really make sense.

But this is Lucifer, Sam tells himself. He can’t be trusted, much less be predicted. He probably brainwashed the girl, keeping her docile and believing in this cover story. There might even have been a real Jarold Kampfer at one point, and Lucifer had swapped places with him, had remade Jarold’s body in Nick's image, and had worked some spell so people wouldn't realize the truth. Or maybe there is something about the specific bodily form of the vessel; maybe there are other doppelgangers of Nick out there. Maybe there are doppelgangers of Sam out there, too.

Sam can't think about that now. His eyes hurt with lack of sleep, his head is pounding and a dark bruise has formed where Carly hit him with the kettle. He has to focus on the road, has to make sure he keeps to the speed limit, too, so he won’t arouse the cops' suspicion. 

With the body of a conked out, heavily drugged teenager on his hands, the last thing he needs is for the police to search his car.

\--

After a few hours, Sam finds a run-down motel, the kind he always feels most comfortable in because it's anonymous and dingy and reminds him of growing up. He sneaks Carly in through the back door. She is going to wake up soon, and he wants to give her a chance to use the restroom, rehydrate and possibly get to her senses again. He also has to get some sleep real soon. Even though there have been no dreams of Lucifer these past days to keep him awake, Sam has actually slept even less than before. Somehow, irrationally, he had been afraid the entire time, afraid that he might ... miss Lucifer's performance, for lack of a better term. Afraid to miss his own delusion – it's so absurd. 

And there was another fear, too. The fear that ultimately convinced him that this is real, that Lucifer is walking the earth again, readying himself for his next strike against mankind. A fear that makes Sam’s life seem like a dry leaf, ready to be crushed, about to crumble into dust in another man’s fist.

But Sam won't let that happen. There are a lot of things he's not – sane probably being one of them – but he sure as anything is a fighter.

\--

Sam cuffs Carly to a chair just before she starts regaining consciousness. At first, she's dazed, drooling a little through her dried-out lips, but soon she's fighting against the cuffs, straining her whole body towards Sam and shouting, "What are you doing? Where am I?" Her voice is angry and her eyes are wet. "Where's my dad?" 

So she's still buying into Lucifer's lies, and it makes Sam so angry. This would be so much easier if she could only see the truth, if she could confirm what he knows and be thankful instead of fighting him.

"He's not your dad," Sam explains, trying to infuse his voice with a sense of calm authority. It's hard to pull off, though, when the blood is rushing so loudly in his ears. "He's taken the place of your dad." No, that might not be the truth. But how could Sam have confirmed that theory one way or the other? He tries again, "Or maybe he has deluded you into thinking he’s your dad." No, that's not right either. If only there were better words, if only Sam could concentrate. He digs his fingernails into his palms, trying to center himself, to refocus. "He might also have changed reality with a spell." He smiles a little, and it feels completely wrong on his face. "It doesn't matter." Sam swallows, says more confidently, "You're safe now. I'm keeping you safe."

Carly looks at him, her features and her posture expressing the same thought. "You're insane," she says, and it's more matter-of-fact than anything else. 

When he doesn't reply, her face seems to change together with her tactics. "Let me go," she says. "I won't tell the police, I promise." She looks at him earnestly. "Just let me go. I’ll find my own way home and forget I ever met you." Her voice is pleading, almost hypnotic, but Sam has to stay strong. He knows what Lucifer can do to people, how he manipulates your mind, changes it and gains control, invades your thoughts. If Carly can't withstand him, Sam has to do it for her.

"No," he says, trying to make his voice soothing. "I can't let you go. You're in danger with that man." He nods reassuringly, getting a little closer – slowly, slowly, like he would with a wounded animal. "You think he's your father, but he's not. He's just going to use you. He's going to hurt you. It's what he is."

She looks at his body moving closer, but she doesn't seem frightened. It’s more like she's … waiting. "The high-end alarm system in your room, the escape-proof glass – you don't think that's normal, do you?" Sam tries to appeal to her sense of reason. "You don't really think other dads keep their children locked up each night?" he asks, taking a step closer.

Suddenly, her face and neck move and twist in a way that seems ... feral. Her canines grow by an inch at least, her nose turns into something like a snout, and there's a gold-white pelt where there was only smooth, human skin a moment before.

Sam takes an instinctive step back. This can't be. She can't be- he stumbles over something that’s behind him and crashes down onto the floor.

"Let me go," she screams in a voice that's deep and rough and not quite human. There's tension in all of her body and a whole lot more muscle, Sam can see it in the way she moves. Differently, more like an animal. What has Lucifer done to her?

The creature, who still looks like Carly in many ways, can't seem to break free of the cuffs, but soon she finds enough strength to get up and smash the chair into the floor again and again until it breaks into pieces. 

Her hands are still bound behind her back, but that doesn’t stop her from pouncing. If Sam wasn’t so tired, if his head wasn’t spinning and his reactions weren’t slower, he might have been able to fend her off. As it is, her teeth are at Sam's throat before he can even fully assess the situation. He feels them sink into his skin, deep into his sinews, and he feels hot blood flowing out of the wound. It doesn't even hurt. 

"What-" He's disoriented, and for a moment, he doesn't remember where he is or why, but then he coughs up bloody foam and continues, "What are you?"

"None of your business," she says as she fumbles the cuff keys out of his pocket. 

"No," he says, the room getting darker and more blurry, "probably not."

If she says something in return, Sam doesn't hear.

\--

He should have bled to death in that motel room. Carly should have left him there, letting the carpet soak up his blood until there was no life left in him.

Instead, she got a first-aid kit from reception and called her dad for help.

\--

When Sam wakes up many hours later, he's the one who's cuffed, but to one of the beds in the room this time. But he's also alive and patched up. He blinks against the light, trying to get the crusty, grainy sensation out of his eyes. There’s a man sitting in a chair next to the bed, just out of Sam’s reach. He wants the guy to be Lucifer, but deep down in his core, Sam knows that he wouldn’t be here right now if the man were any other than Jarold Kampfer.

"So," Jarold says. "Carly tells me you were trying to save her from me."

"I-" Sam's mouth is so dry he can hardly speak. "Yes."

"I am her father," Jarold says and his tone doesn’t leave room for doubt. "I have been there in the delivery room and when she scraped her knee for the first time. I read Goodnight Moon to her a thousand times when she was little, and I have watched every single one of her soccer games." He swallows, obviously trying to tame his own anger. "I almost lost her once before, and I will not lose her again."

"Yeah." Carly comes to stand behind her father, one hand grabbing his shoulder in a deeply familiar way. "That's why we had the alarm system installed and the burglar-proof glass put into my window." There's a lot of strength in her, Sam senses that, but she still has to steel herself before she speaks the next words. "So no one could kidnap me again. Try to rape me to make me part of their pack."

Sam's face must show his horror at what she says. "Yeah," Carly spits out. "That's what the last guy who snatched me from my room almost did to me."

Jarold's hand finds his daughter’s fingers curled tightly around his shoulders without even looking and he pats her soothingly. Then he fixates Sam with a stare.

"Don't think for one moment that I don't want to kill you or at least hand you over to the police." Carly makes a growling, assenting sound.

"But we went through your stuff to see if you worked alone, and we found a few things.” He gives Sam a significant look. "Seems like you're a Grimm." Jarold says the word like it should mean something to Sam, so Sam doesn't dare to let on that he has no idea what Jarold's talking about.

"And even though we're supposed to be enemies, a Grimm helped me get my daughter back." The tension in Jarold's whole being is palpable. “And everything you said to Carly indicates that you meant her no harm, that you really thought she was in danger." Jarold takes a deep breath, like he’s not really comfortable with what he's about to say. "So I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt."

Sam heaves a sigh of relief and it turns into a violent, dried-out cough.

Jarold Kampfer gets up and bends down close into Sam's face. "Just so we're clear, though: You stay away from us, you stay away from Portland. And if I ever see you again, I am going to call my Grimm friend, and the both of us will hunt you down and kill you without even blinking." He makes the same head movement Sam saw on Carly earlier, and his face and hands change just like hers did until he looks ... wolfish.

As they’re about to leave, Carly turns back towards Sam one more time and lets her face change. She bares her teeth and a deep, aggressive sound pushes out of her mouth and into the room before she shuts the door with a bang.

Sam’s still drowsy, but in spite of the blood loss, his body feels more rested than it has in a long time. What Jarold and Carly said seems to make a strange sort of sense. Even though Sam only heard fragments of it, their story rings true – and Sam’s thoughts from the last few days sound more like the delusions of a mad man.

There's a rustling of sheets, and when Sam looks over to the other bed in the room, there's a man lying there, hands clasped behind his neck and legs crossed casually. His dark-blond hair stands up in messy spikes and his blue eyes are twinkling. He looks relaxed, happy – like he just came back from vacation.

"Oh, Sammy," he says, cocking his head and smiling brightly. "I’m sure housekeeping will find you tomorrow. But before that, we are going to have _so much fun_." Lucifer raises his eyebrows meaningfully. "Just like old times."


End file.
